Market

The
market for Pennsylvania covers is strictly
divided by county. A couple of general rules
apply. First there is a marked preference for
19th century material and especially stampless
covers. Second, material from western
Pennsylvania is scarcer and of course, more
avidly collected. The most popular collecting
areas are the independent post offices of
Philadelphia county and the oil producing areas
in Northwest Pennsylvania. There exist two happy
accidents, Bucks county and Lancaster county,
that are both avidly collected and material
exists in some abundance. There are many, many
areas with little collector interest and tons of
available material. Chester and Delaware county
come to mind.

Among the 50 states, the District of
Columbia, R.P.O.'s and Streetcars,
Pennsylvania rates as the 30th state in
terms of percentage of covers sold at
51.75%. It ranks 3rd in terms of the
value of covers sold as percentage of
all town cancels sold at 6.00%. The
overall rank is 9th. This is a ten year
running average. The most recent trends
are increasing.

I
thought it might be interesting to
quantify the level of interest for all
the counties in Pennsylvania. I figured
the percentage of covers I have sold as
compared to the total of the covers sold
and the covers available. Since some of
the Pennsylvania covers I sell are not
sold to Pennsylvania collectors, I
decided to eliminate flags and doanes
from the total of covers sold. While not
perfect, this should provide more
accurate results. This is what I found: